It\'s a nice way of hiding sources of time sinks.

However, it also allows the gameplay to be more fast-paced. You won\'t find groups boss camping for 60 minutes.

Their reasoning for this system is that hardcore players won\'t be too far ahead of anyone else. Casual players usually feel pressured to catch up to their friends and end up \"forced\" to push themselves further in level.

It is a win-win situation for both the company and the players.

From the company side, they retain customers longer and reduce the number of people trafficking the servers. From the  customer side, they can choose to play more casually rather than play long hours to try to get as much value as they can from the game subscription; or not have to play long hours to catch up to their friends.

Hey Mogura. Is Conquer any good though? I was looking at its skill system.... doesn\'t seem like it has much depth or innovations.

3x accuracy for one looks like crap since spells of this sort take so little effort to code.

Hmm, AHH, eEcch.... can\'t decide which one to download. I ended up cancelling the downloads. I figure I already have too little time without the games.

... Now to work....

I\'ve finally read all of the wheel of time books including the prequel....

The tenth book had a lot going for it with Mat\'s situation, Perrin\'s dilemma, and Rand\'s stuff...  the problem was that Robert Jordan decided to stretch out events that happened BEFORE the end of the ninth book.

I would be okay if it was full of Mat\'s adventures who maintains the most of my interest, but instead, RJ decided to describe Cairhenien (sp?) politics, made Perrin\'s dilemma longer than it should be, and added in completely uninteresting/uneventful meetings between Darkfriends and the likes.

Politics were bad enough... It\'s hardly interesting keeping track of which house supports who.

.... On the other hand, the prequel, albeit short, was interesting and provided a break from the tenth book.

Now that I\'m done with all the current books, I have a void of anxiety awaiting the next prequels and two (or three) final books.

I ended up wasting two weeks doing little work because of these books (can you believe RJ took 20 years thinking/writing this stuff?). I only suggest getting all the books at the same time if you can cope with living like a hermit in your room, and getting up only for food.

Currently on book 7 of WOT series after a week of reading... lots of wasted time reading, but at least entertaining.

The first five books were really good, but from there it goes downhill. It takes soooo long for anything to happen. I find myself skimming through those parts. For example, nothing happens for a while until finally Nynaeve did ........ Then it goes downhill again and we go into a state of useless limbo.

It still makes me continue reading, but I really hate how everything is dragged out. If only he wrote his later books like the first four instead of inserting useless events where everyone does nothing special.

I\'m sure many of you will also agree. Anything to do with Children of the Light is *snore...*

...Post edited although I can hardly see how I gave any spoilers.

Here\'s what you gotta do if you really want to be a game programmer.

It is recommended to get a degree in software engineering or computer science. Equally good is a school to specifically teach game programming.

Here\'s where you might have a problem.... experience. If you didn\'t work on anything at school that is game-related, you need to make your own experience. Learn to tools necessary to what you want to SPECIALIZE in. If you don\'t specialize, you might have problems.

Experience is really essential since you need to show that you can make them money. That\'s what it\'s all about in the end. It may be enough just to show them that you can code in openGL and whatnot. You don\'t need to make a game by yourself.

That said, I also wanted to be a game programmer, but decided against it since it kinda restricts what jobs you can find. Specializing in the IT fields is more practical in my opinion.... Could be loads of fun too having a few servers at home for fun.

I remember when I was in in high school.

-> Kid was stabbed, but survived since the blade barely missed the liver.
-> Free dress days means hell for kids wearing uniforms
-> Cool = be rude to teachers and nerds, and acting tough.
-> Lots of fights for the sake of being cool (see above).
-> Lockers broken into a lot, coats stolen, bus passes stolen.

... but this is actually normal.

On the other hand, this crap rarely happens in college. Security is very tight, and the stupid people find out that the definition of cool isn\'t to be stupid anymore.

I\'ve seen so many ideas from this forum, and new ones just pop up so others become buried. While this would serve as some form of entertainment for those anticipating the game, having new posts all the time undermines the process of brainstorming (two phases: idea generation and idea reduction.)

The problem is that we have nothing for idea reduction.  Ideas just keep getting buried, uncategorized, and forgotten.

My suggesstion are a few sticky posts (for each category) where interesting ideas can be grouped together to be put into some form of a configuration baseline. These ideas should be categorized (combat skills, spell skills, crafting skills, monsters, locations, guild system, partying system, experience/looting system, chatting/communication interface, and so on).

Ideas can only be put into the thread if they have decent grammar and spelling. Another thing they must have are few suggestions about how you would design this idea to work in a game context.

For example, an idea such as, \"Let\'s have a martial arts skill!\"

This alone is useless unless you expand upon it. For example, this skill allows you to make better efficient use of weapons (Faster attack? More damage? Which weapons?), and unlocking more advanced combat skills related to martial arts and so forth.

Although I am against calling ideas useless, I\'ve seen so many that look that they were written by 10-year-olds, and others that don\'t describe enough to give a sense of how it works.

Now what we need are a few people to organize these ideas, build on them, and reduce them!

Otherwise, the ideas are just gonna build. At this point, I don\'t even think the devs care anymore about the wish list. It\'s a friggin\' mountain of unorganized words.

I\'ve made a search on google as well, and decided to post this link on the brainstorming process (common knowledge in many software engineering management books):
http://www.ogc.gov.uk/sdtkdev/examples/HMCE/Guidance/RequirementsManagement/brainstorming.htm